This invention relates to computer networks and, more particularly, to the management of computer networks.
Because of the explosion in the complexity of computer networks, computer network management has become critical. Network management is required to perform fault diagnosis, performance management, predict loads, plan for future traffic and the like. Indeed, automated tools for computer network management on such large-scale complex and heterogeneous networks are crucial to ensure that the networks remain healthy and available.
Known network management tools and methodologies are presently not capable of filtering information intelligently at the individual network elements. Furthermore, there is little support for event notification, which results in excessive network management traffic.
The present dominant standard for network management is the xe2x80x9cSimple Network Management Protocolxe2x80x9d (SNMP). SNMP and other known network management methodologies suffer from a number of deficiencies including the following:
Generate a High Volume of Management Traffic: The SNMP protocol supports retrieval of single objects stored at network elements but does not allow any sort of computation to be performed at the individual network elements. As a result, large volumes of data may need to be transferred to a network manager (station at which network management is being performed) and the network manager may filter most of the retrieved data.
No Support for Event Notification: Although there is primitive support for event notification in the form of traps in SNMP, it is not sufficiently expressive. Therefore, network management using SNMP is predominantly polling based, which results in the familiar problems of either missing an event (if the polling interval is long) or incurring a large overhead (if the polling interval is short). To perform effective and efficient network management, support for complex event detection and notification is required. For example, a network manager may want to be notified when the average error rate on all the interfaces of a switch exceeds ten percent.
Centralized processing: Network management has traditionally been performed in a centralized fashion primarily to ensure that the impact of adding network management to managed nodes is minimal. However, the central network manager could become a bottleneck as the network complexity increases.
Problems and limitations of prior known computer network management arrangements are addressed by incorporating database technology into individual network elements of the computer network. This, in turn, allows such enhanced network elements to filter management information intelligently and also to notify an associated network manager of the occurrence of complex events of interest. More specifically, the network elements are enhanced through use of database technology to process declarative queries and to support triggers.
Additionally, one or more auxiliary network managers, that perform as proxies for network elements that have not been enhanced with database technology, are employed to collect and integrate management information from one or more non-enhanced network elements. Consequently, the management information supplied to a network manager from the auxiliary network mangers could be significantly less than that collected from the network elements. Thus, the auxiliary network managers further reduce the network management traffic.
In a specific embodiment of the invention, support is embedded into the individual network elements for a declarative query language, one example being the structured query language (SQL). Support is also added for event notification to the individual network elements. One or more auxiliary network managers are employed that can answer declarative inquiries. Moreover, the management information base information stored in the individual network elements is modeled as relational tables that are queried.